The Children: Some Educational Problems

by Alexander Darroch

In the first place, Mill declares that there are "certain primary elements and means of knowledge that all human beings born into the community must acquire during childhood." If their parents have the power of obtaining for them this instruction and fail to do so, they commit a double breach of duty. The child grows up an imperfect being, socially inefficient, and members of the community are liable to suffer seriously from the consequences of this ignorance and want of education in their fellow-citizens.

In the second place, Mill urges that unlike that the giving of other forms of help, the provision of education is not one of the things in which the tender of help perpetuates the state of things which renders help necessary. Instruction strengthens and enlarges the active faculties; its effect is favourable to the growth of the spirit of independence—it is help towards doing without help.

In the third place, he declares that the question of the provision of elementary education is not one between its provision by the Government on the one hand, and its provision through voluntary agencies on the other. The full cost of the education of the children of the lower working classes in Great Britain as in other countries has never been wholly paid for out of the wages of the labourer, and hence the question lies between the State provision of education and its provision by certain charitable agencies. As a rule, when provided by the latter, it is both inefficient in quantity and poor in quality.

Lastly, Mill lays down that in the matter of education the intervention of Government is necessary, because neither the interest nor the judgment of the consumer is a sufficient security for the goodness of the commodity.

But at the same time he strenuously insists that there should be no monopoly of education by the State. It is not desirable, he declares, that a government should have complete control over the education of the people. To possess such a control and actually to exert it would be despotic. The State may, however, require that all its people shall have received a certain measure of education, but it may not prescribe from whom or where they may obtain it.

At the present day, and under the changed economic conditions which now prevail, it can no longer be asserted that the imparting of the mere elements of knowledge is adequate either to secure the future social efficiency of the children of the lower classes of society or that such a modicum of instruction as is provided by our Elementary Schools is sufficient to protect the community from the ignorance of its ill educated and badly trained members. The "hooliganism" of many of our large cities is due to our system of half educating, half training the children of the slums, of laying too much stress on the acquisition of certain mechanical arts in our Primary Schools and in conceiving them as ends in themselves. Further, our system of primary education fails on its moral side, and this in two ways. It seems unaware of the fact that all moral education is an endeavour to implant in the minds of the young desires that shall impel them hereafter to good rather than to evil, and that this end can only be attained in so far as the natural instinctive tendencies of the child's nature which make for good are cultivated and trained, and in so far as those other instinctive tendencies which make for social destruction are inhibited by having their character altered so as to be directed into channels which make for the social welfare. In the second place, we leave off the education of the children at too early an age. We hand over the children of the poorer classes during the most critical period of their lives to the influences of the streets and of the bad home, counteracted only by the efforts of the slum visitor or the missionary. After furnishing them with the mere instruments of knowledge, we entrust either to them or their parents the liberty of using, misusing, or non-using the instruments provided. Moreover, we do nothing of a systematic nature to instil into the youth of our poorer citizens the fact that they are members of a corporate community and future citizens of a State, and that hereafter they have duties towards that State the performance of which is the only rational ground of their possession of rights as against the State. E.g., in many of our slums we have the best examples of individualism run mad, of the conception that the individual is a law unto his private self, and that all government is something alien, something forced upon the individual from the outside and impinging upon his private will, instead of law being what it really is, an expression of the social conditions under which the welfare of the individual and of society may be attained.

Further, it must be maintained that our present policy in education is economically wasteful. To spend, as we do yearly, larger and larger sums of money on the elementary education of our children, and then, in a large number of cases, to fail to reach the ends of securing either the social efficiency of the individual or the protection of society against the ignorance of its members, is surely, to say the least, unwise. Again, if we really set before us this aim of the social efficiency of the future individual, we must do something to carry on the education of the children of the poorer classes after the Elementary School stage has been passed.

One of the strongest points in the German system of education, as compared and contrasted with our own, is the care which is taken of the higher education of the children of the working classes during the period when it is most important that some control should be exercised over the youth of the country, throughout the time when the boy is most open to temptation, and when the moral forces of society are potent for good and evil in shaping and forming his character. The great majority of the children in a modern State are and must be destined for industrial service; the great majority of the children of the working classes must, at or about the age of fourteen, leave the Primary School and enter upon the learning of some trade. But manifestly at this early stage the larger number are not fitted to guide and control their own lives; and if moral education aims, as it ought to aim, at fitting the individual for freedom, at fitting him to guide and direct his own life in the light of a self-accepted and a self-directed ideal, then some measure of control, of guidance, and of regulation is necessary in the years when the child is passing from youth to manhood. Now, it is this fact, this truth, which the Germans as a nation have realised. They declare that it is neither wise nor prudent nor for the ultimate benefit of the State to leave the vast majority of the youth without guidance, and sometimes even without proper moral control exercised over them during the great formative period of their lives. Nay, further, they believe that a State which neglects its duty here is not doing what it ought to do for the future moral good, for the future economic welfare, and for the future happiness of its individual members. Hence, in several of the German States, the State control over the child does not cease when at fourteen years of age he leaves the Elementary School, but is continued until the age of seventeen; and this is effected by the establishment of compulsory Evening Schools. In particular, by a law which came into force in Berlin on the 1st April 1905, every boy and girl in that city, with certain definitely specified exceptions, must attend at an Evening Continuation School for a minimum of not less than four hours and a maximum of not more than six hours per week. Moreover, this enactment has been rendered necessary not to level up the majority, but to level up the minority. This development is a development for which the voluntary Evening Continuation School prepared the way; and compulsory attendance has become possible on account of the willingness of the German youth to learn, and of his desire to make himself proficient in his particular trade or profession. Further, the school authorities, in this matter of compulsory attendance at an Evening Continuation School, have with them the hearty co-operation of the great body of employers; and the burden of seeing that the pupil attends regularly is not put upon the parent but upon the employer. By these means, and by other agencies of a voluntary character, every care is taken that the Berlin youth shall have the opportunity of finding that employment for which by nature he is best suited, and that thereafter he shall learn thoroughly the particular trade or calling he may enter upon.

Contrast what we do, or rather what we do not do, in this matter of providing higher education for the sons and daughters of the working classes. In our large towns the great majority of our boys and girls leave the Elementary School at or before the age of fourteen. In many cases the instruction given during this period soon passes away, and leaves little permanent result behind. Evening Continuation Schools are indeed provided, but only a small proportion of our youth takes advantage of this means of further instruction. The larger number of the children of the lower working classes drift, for a year or two, into various forms of unskilled employment, chosen in most cases because the immediate pecuniary reward is here greater than in the case of learning a trade; and after spending two or three years in employments which do nothing to educate them, some drift, by accident, into this or that particular trade, while the others remain behind to swell the number of the unskilled. During this period nothing of an organised nature is done to secure the physical efficiency of the youth of our working classes; nothing or almost nothing is done to secure his future industrial efficiency; and, as a consequence, year after year, as a nation, we go on fostering an army of loafers, increasing the ranks of the unskilled workers, and even in our skilled trades adding to the number of those who are mere process workers, at the expense of producing workers acquainted both theoretically and practically with every department of their particular calling. No wonder that the delegates of the brass-workers[10] of Birmingham, contrasting what they have seen in Berlin with what they daily see in their own trade at home and in their own city, bitterly declare that the Berlin youth has from infancy been under better care and training at home, at school, at the works, and in the Army; and consequently, as a man, he is more fitted to be entrusted with the liberty which the Birmingham youth has perhaps from childhood only abused.

Space does not permit me to go at fuller length into this question, but before leaving the particular problem let me put the issue plainly, because it is an issue which we as a nation must soon clearly realise, and must answer in either one or other of two ways. We may go on as at present, insisting that a certain amount of elementary education is compulsory for all, and leaving it a matter for the individual parent and the individual youth to take advantage of the means of higher education provided voluntarily, and as a rule without any great direct cost to them. In this way, trusting to the voluntary agencies at work in society, we may hope that either through enlightened self-interest, or through a higher conception of the duty of the individual to the State, or through a loftier moral ideal becoming prevalent and actual in society, an increasing number of parents will see that the means provided for the higher education of their children are duly taken advantage of, and that the majority of the youth will make it their aim to use these means to secure their physical and industrial efficiency. If we adopt this course, then it must be the duty of the school authorities of the various districts to see that Evening Schools of various types suited to the needs of the various classes of students are duly provided, and that no insurmountable obstacles are placed in the way of those desirous and anxious to take advantage of the means of higher education. Further, it must become the duty of the employers of the country to see that the youth are encouraged in every way to take advantage of instruction designed with the above-named end in view, and moreover the general public must do all in their power to co-operate with and to aid the endeavours of school authorities and employers of labour. In this way, as has been the case in Berlin, the voluntary system of Evening Continuation and Trade Schools may gradually and in time pave the way for the compulsory Evening School. Without doubt this were the better way, if it could be effected and that quickly.